A CENTURY-OLD SECRET
have made lynching a federal crime at a time when the practice was emblematic of the nadir of American race relations.
The 1922 bill failed in the Senate with the staunch opposition of Southern Democrats. It was among more than 200 attempts to outlaw lynching federally before the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed into law last year, making lynching, now a largely uncommon phenomenon, a crime carrying a 30-year prison sentence.
“You can pass it now because it doesn’t mean anything, it’s good publicity,” Buckelew said. “It’s like passing an anti-slavery law now. It doesn’t have much effect.”
The Equal Justice Initiative recorded more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states making up the American South. Lynchings were less common by the 1950s, though high-profile examples like Till’s murder in 1955 figure prominently in the public conscience.
In recent years, Buckelew’s work with the Volusia Remembers Coalition helped unearth previously undocumented cases in Volusia County. Cases like the 1939 lynching of Lee Snell, a taxi driver beaten and shot as he was being escorted to jail for allegedly hitting a white boy riding a bicycle, is one of five memorialized by collecting soil from the sites and donating them to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala.
The usual starting point for researchers like Buckelew is newspaper accounts. But the challenges in finding many of the records mean any estimates in the number of lynchings are likely to be conservative.
Those fortunate enough to escape, like Mack, would flee the area and change their identities to avoid detection. Also like Mack, whose name was recorded in a 1923 NAACP report as having been “lynched by a mob,” loved ones who stay behind often don’t dispute the reported deaths.
It was a defensive mechanism, Dunn said, one which he understands intimately. In the 1920s, his grandparents fled south Georgia to Orlando after his grandfather killed a white man, but he would sneak back under the cloak of night to visit his family over holidays.
“This went on for years,” Dunn said. “There were Black men who would leave but then maintain ties with their families which would be kept secret by everybody to protect that person.”
Dunn doesn’t know his grandfather’s name, only knowing him by his alias, Buck Williams. Anyone who would have likely known his real name has long since died, he said.
Unlike Mack’s great-grandchildren, who were eventually able to piece together Mack’s true identity, Dunn and others might never be able to.
“In a sense, it means I’m not quite sure who I am,” Dunn said. “There’s no way of filling that in, everybody’s dead now. Many, many Black families in the South have had the same experience, and one reason why it’s not all that well known is because it’s not supposed to be all that well known.”
Finding Oscar Mack
Renee Bronson grew up knowing the story about the night a Black postal worker killed her great-grandfather, Stewart Ivey, from her grandmother, who was 8 when he and Reinhardt were shot dead.
Marguerite Ivey Bronson, Stewart Ivey’s daughter, told the story to her grandchildren, referring to it as “the night that n——- shot your granddaddy.”
Much of Bronson’s understanding of what happened matches with what the Brown family later learned, but she long wondered if Oscar Mack had escaped or, as many at the time assumed, he had been caught by the lynch mob.
Finding out he survived, Bronson said, brought her peace.
“All my life I thought he had been lynched, and that made my burden of guilt by heritage so much heavier and so much harder to carry,” Bronson said. “When I heard he survived and went on to raise a family, I was thrilled.”
For years, many in Mack’s family besides his wife and stepdaughter didn’t know what really happened. Mack’s grandchildren for a long time only knew him as Lanier Johnson, and his great-grandchildren were only kids the day he died in 1960. At some point, Malissa Hurt, one of Mack’s grandchildren, was told the story of his true identity and kept it to herself before sharing it with her nephew, Marvin Brown, at a wedding in 1999.
“We sat at a gazebo, and she began to share with me what Grandma told her and how long my grandmother kept it a secret,” he said. “She was told never to mention it to anyone but that [my grandmother] wanted her to be aware of it.
He told the Sentinel he didn’t know what to make of it at the time, since Hurt had forgotten her grandfather’s real name until many years later. Mildred Hurt, Malissa’s sister and matriarch of Brown’s family, died without knowing Mack’s story.
Florida Hurt, Mack’s stepdaughter, divulged more details at her Akron home in 2001. The elder Hurt died six years later, at 94.
From there, James Brown, known by his relatives as the family historian, got to work, trying to find any cases from the 1920s involving a Black man escaping a lynch mob.
“It just stayed with me,” he said. “My grandmother was able to give us a lot of information, but I wanted to delve into it a lot further.”
Unknown to him and his family, a group of students at Rollins College led by history professor Julian Chambliss began investigating the 1922 shooting. The class project, assigned in 2013, began with a single newspaper clipping found by Curtis Michelson, a researcher with Democracy Forum.
The clipping was in a pile of material collected as research of the Ocoee massacre by Democracy Forum, which made significant contributions in the late 1990s to how that event is understood today. It didn’t come up again until Michelson was reminded of Lake Jennie Jewel, which sits next to Orange Avenue near Holden Heights, along the route where Michelson would ride his bike.
From there, the students spent a semester looking into the shooting and Mack’s subsequent escape from Kissimmee. They scoured newspaper accounts and dove into census and other records available on sites like Ancestry.com, to piece together the life of the Black World War I veteran forced to flee his hometown.
“I wanted to make it a pure student project that was guided by Julian and I, and that turned out to be really good,” Michelson said.
But without a death certificate confirming Mack was killed that year, and conflicting accounts of his demise — including Howe’s reports, which assumed Mack was likely dead and were mentioned in a 2008 book about antiBlack violence in the 20th century — the project hit a dead end.
Chambliss, who now teaches English at Michigan State University, said that is partly explained by inconsistent record keeping about Black people. The distortions in how Mack was portrayed in contemporary news reports further presented a challenge in telling a more complete story of who he was and what happened that night.
“The normal mechanisms that are used to document people are often not used to document Black people, or really any people of color, throughout American history,” Chambliss said. “You’re forced to sort of seek them and humanize them through a variety of means. That’s really complicated, especially when you’re telling a story of racial violence, because Black people are victims and you’re trying, as best you can, to tell their human story with the data that you have.”
A website created to publicly document the project’s findings sat online and was about to be taken down when, in 2014, there was finally a breakthrough.
Back in Akron, the Brown family stumbled on the site and pored over the stories about a suspected lynching in Kissimmee and the Black man who may or may not have survived it. They read out Mack’s name and Malissa Hurt, her nephew recalled, was ecstatic.
“She said, ‘That’s it, that’s the name! I got chills.’ I’ll never forget that,” Marvin Brown said.
James Brown reached out to Michelson soon after, who connected him to researchers at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. And for the next three years, Chambliss, Michelson and the team from UF worked with the Brown family to fill the gaps in the tale of Mack’s life.
Many of the records kept by the Brown family are now archived by the university.
“My grandmother held on to all that information; we have the letters, we have everything,” James Brown said. “I guess she held on to it not really knowing that one day this would probably become news.”
Bridge of freedom to love
Marvin Brown recalls few details from when he attended the funeral of the man he only knew as Lanier Johnson, held at Glendale Cemetery in Akron on Jan. 6, 1960. It was cold and breezy that morning, and the ceremony was attended by a small group of relatives.
Johnson “died a pauper,” recalled Marvin Brown, who was a child when he attended the funeral with his mother. He remembers Johnson being laid in a metal casket that “wasn’t considered top of the line.” He didn’t know who Johnson was at the time, as he and his siblings had virtually no contact with Johnson before he died.
Malissa Hurt, Oscar Mack’s granddaughter, remembers him as a quiet, kind man who would speak lovingly with his grandchildren, often about their schooling, the few times they would visit him. His surviving great-grandchildren don’t remember meeting him at all.
“It was my first time ever seeing someone being lowered into the cold ground, and that was the first time I learned of his existence,” Marvin Brown said. James Brown, his brother, said their mother, Mildred Hurt, “never really talked about him” either.
“He was just Mr. Johnson,” James Brown said.
That is, until June 28, 2017. Unlike the day of his funeral, this one was warmer, less windy and had fewer clouds in the sky as Malissa Hurt, the Brown family, their friends and the researchers arrived at his grave.
Johnson had rested there undisturbed for decades, his secret all but lost to history. That day, his family replaced his gravestone to include his given name while Chambliss, Michelson and the documentarians from UF observed.
It was a redo of his funeral. Those in attendance were dressed in black. Hymns were sung and eulogies were read. The Rev. Alexis Brinkley-Felder, a longtime friend of the Brown family who witnessed as they pieced together Mack’s story, presided over the ceremony.
But the atmosphere wasn’t somber. Instead, it was a celebration of Mack’s life and an acknowledgment of his struggle. His alias remained on the stone, to recognize the identity he took on after he was forced to leave Kissimmee.
“We all have this gap as African-Americans that we can’t identify and no one can tell us,” said Brinkley-Felder, who spoke on Mack’s journey in her eulogy. “So when we put someone’s story together, we feel like we’re closer to our own story.”
It’s a story further memorialized in a poem read at the funeral written by Vanessa Bonner, Mack’s great-granddaughter. Called “The Bridge of Freedom to Love,” it’s a retelling of Mack’s journey, that of a soldier returning from war only to fight another for his life.
It began:
I fought to live but riddled in fear Shadows of my past haunted me within Forced to flee by fight that night I sought for help by a spirit of light She showed me the way from a bright star above
For which brought me to a place of safety and love
“I felt the presence of someone else driving me to write this poem and I could see him running, I could see the woods, I could feel the dampness,” Bonner said of the piece. “I could see the moonlight and it’s piercing through the trees at night. I could feel the fight in him, that he was
being directed, and I can just feel him surviving.”
During the trip to Akron, the researchers visited Malissa Hurt’s home, where boxes of photographs, letters and other documents belonging to Mack and stored in an attic were copied while she and her family gave on-camera interviews.
The material they collected that day is archived by UF and will be part of a documentary scheduled to screen in April, six years after the rededication ceremony. Deborah Hendrix, who has been with UF’s oral history program since 2005, is leading its production.
Far from her first foray in uncovering Black stories of fighting back against racial terror, Hendrix said Mack’s “is not a normal story,” echoing the experts who said his experience is not meant to be well-known, sometimes even by family. The fact his story is known at all, and the way it came to be known, is largely unheard of.
“The whole day was like you were going to the funeral of someone who had just passed away,” Hendrix said of the rededication ceremony. “In a metaphorical and literal way, that’s what it was, the passing of the fictitious person and coming full circle. And it’s not the last chapter.”
At the rededication ceremony, James Brown spoke about his desire for reconciliation for Mack by remembering his story and learning from it. And before they met, Bronson had been working with her local church toward what she called “annihilating racism.”
Their nearly two-hour conversation was the first of what they hope will be many to come. She and the Brown family hope to meet during the documentary screening, to which they were both invited.
“The thing that pains me is the beast is still alive in our culture,” Bronson said. “We still have hate crime, we still have hatred and we still have a lot of people with some very distorted ideas about what justice is and what equality and fairness are.”
“I often say the color of racism is nothing more than fear,” James Brown told her. “I’m sitting here and listening to you, and it’s really helping me . ... It bothers me that people still look at me based on my color.”
There are still many unanswered questions about Mack’s story. How did he escape Kissimmee so quickly and without detection? Where was his brother during the ordeal, and how were they able to reconnect once Mack left the state? Did Meta Wideman’s family know who she was writing to and visiting in Akron?
They are questions that might never be answered, but Mack’s tale offers another perspective of a tumultuous era in the history of U.S. race relations. His escape from Florida, Michelson said, was part of the Great Migration, in which millions of Black Americans left the South over decades, in part to escape the violence that came with Jim Crow.
“All of this violence is happening; we all feel it, but people of color lived in that kind of trauma in a way whites did not and everybody shared it,” Michelson said. “Oscar Mack’s story is that of survival and making a way where there was no way.”
For Chambliss, Mack’s journey, like many told throughout history, is tragic. There’s no way to reliably tell how many people were lynched or were otherwise victims of anti-Black violence, which he fears “might be a lot larger than we’re all willing to comprehend.”
But Mack’s story ends with a different outcome, Chambliss said. He survived. He was able to raise a family. His descendants went on to build their own lives while carrying — unknowingly, for years — his legacy of survival and resilience.
With that, and through the connections made with researchers in Orlando, they were able to uncover his story and return to him his identity. Even many years after the Brown family first learned about their great-grandfather, they hope new details emerge to fill the remaining pieces of the puzzle.
“We have, at some level, pulled together a story of Oscar Mack,” Chambliss said. “It’s not necessarily the complete history that it could be, but his humanity is restored.”